Laura van den Berg’s first short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, wowed me with its melancholy misfits, elegant expressiveness and intriguing plot lines. This made me eager to read her debut novel Find Me—which traces a pandemic as seen through the eyes of a young woman called Joy Jones.
Joy once worked in a supermarket called Stop & Shop and it supported her addiction to the cough medicine Robitussin. We first meet her when she has been in isolation with another 150 patients in a hospital in Kansas for three months. She is part of a study to try to determine what is causing the silver blisters and rapid loss of memory that characterises the disease and that has killed 400,000 people so far.
The head of the study, Dr Bek, believes the world is fragile and ‘it only takes the smallest change to turn our lives inside out … the smallest alteration can create the perfect atmosphere for a new disease to emerge’.
Joy knows this fragility first hand—having been abandoned as a baby and ‘found in a cardboard supermarket box in the early stages of frostbite’, and then been a foster child in some dangerous circumstances.
In fact, Joy and the other patients do not just share immunity they also have all endured trauma. Joy’s roommate and occasional lover Louis, for example, has lost his wife.
Joy and the others have also been affected to some degree by wider ‘terrors’ like Y2K fever, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the death of bees and bats, radioactive oceans and roaring hurricanes.
‘Joy is scrappy and smart and her childhood has actually prepared her well for the hospital and what happens after,’ says van Den Berg of her protagonist. And it’s true, not much fazes her—which is just as well because she needs every bit of tenacity to carry her through.
In the high-security environment of the hospital, Joy trawls the internet to find out more about her mother. When she learns that she’s an acclaimed underwater archaeologist, she wryly describes her as having ‘a special talent for searching, for finding, but not for holding on. I am proof of that.’
In one documentary Joy watches, her mother admits that she looks at a painting by Winslow Homer every night, ‘the falling light, the small act of three men rowing, set against the vast motions of the sea—and it helps her find her place in the world, to feel at peace’.
Such simple habits are all some people need to keep them happy and at ease. For others it is harder. ‘We should be desperate to forget [trauma],’ says Dr Bek, ‘and yet our conscious minds want us to remember, to stay alive.’
‘In Oslo, I learned, that in the fight against illness, the mind is the most powerful weapon at our disposal,’ he adds.
The major threat from the disease is ‘an epidemic of forgetting’ and a character called No Name also thinks somebody very much wants people to forget. Another character called Nelson claims that he helped a woman called Darcie beat the disease. ‘We got the blood flow redirected, got those capillaries snapping again. Got her consciousness back.’
While van Den Berg’s theme of memory and forgetting feels amorphous at times, it still left me with some strong impressions. Firstly, the strength of mind it can take to be a survivor. And, secondly, that without personal or public remembrance—without history—people can easily forget how to be resilient, how to fight abuse and how not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Journey to the mother
Throughout the latter part of the book, Joy is on a journey. She believes she knows where her mother lives and what she looks like, so she flees the hospital to go in search of her. Marcus, an old friend from one of her foster homes, joins her on her travels.
Partway through the trip, she steals money from a sleeping man who has two thousand dollars in his wallet.
Joy is on a bus with people singing into the night when she thinks, ‘It is a relief to know that there are people out there who will always choose living.’
She is on a boat when she imagines asking her mother, ‘Did you really think you could ever bury me?’
As the boat edges closer to her mother’s home town, she thinks more positively about sharing a future with her, ‘I imagine all of us grabbing this new life and living it and living it and living it.’
Why seek it?
Find Me has received some rave reviews and been favourably compared with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. To me, it wasn’t as poignant. It also didn’t capture and compel me like van Den Berg’s first collected stories did—and still do. I turn to them often.
Small quibbles about Find Me include the overuse of metaphor and the words ‘like’ and ‘imagine’. There were also too many lists (I love lists in fiction—but they were just too numerous here).
My larger concern relates to the fact that Joy has been wounded by life and numbed by it. I really wanted to feel her pain but, as she seemed hardly able to feel it herself, this was difficult. Joy’s interior monologue is so dominant that the other characters she relates with seem dreamlike and detached—so they are also quite hard to connect with.
I am wondering if I read Find Me too soon after reading Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel—which I loved, and especially its warm tone and diverse characters. Did doubling up on dystopian fiction mean I lost the second book’s sense of urgency? That I interpreted it as colder?
I know van Den Berg can write well and has good ideas, so I want to suggest you seek out Find Me, Isle of Youth (her second short story collection that I’m yet to read) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and let me know what you think of her talents.
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